Development Update.
You may be wondering why we haven't put out a new CourseForum or ProjectForum release for a little while now. Never fear, nothing terrible happened, and we are in fact working hard on it, it's just going somewhat slower than we'd hoped it would.
Normally, new releases modify only the "application" code - features and functions that are very visible in the running software, while the underlying infrastructure (database stuff, language runtime, all the cross-platform layer) stays the same. Because we only need to worry about the high-level application side, development is generally pretty quick.
We've actually been using the same low-level pieces for years; they've worked well, and provided the facilities we needed. But one of the things we're doing this release is upgrading those low-level pieces to current releases. For the technical folks, that's primarily the open source Tclkit runtimes (Tcl, Metakit, etc.) on all the various platforms.
We needed to make some changes in any case, as there's now a new platform to deal with: Mac OS X on Intel. Obviously we want to ship a Universal binary there, though its worth noting that the PowerPC version works fantastically well on Intel machines right now, with no changes. But upgrading to the new versions of the low-level infrastructure code also allows us to take advantage of a number of bug fixes and other enhancements made in those over the past few years. Unfortunately, the new versions aren't quite drop in replacements yet, so we're working (along with others in the open source community) on getting all that up to snuff.
The other thing we're doing is addressing some extremely rare bugs that a handful of customers have reported. By the nature of these bugs, it can take some time to track them down. We've already knocked off a few of them, but there's still one or two more we'd like to take care of.
The expectation is that once we get this release done with all the low-level infrastructure upgrades, we'll be back on track with faster application-level changes (new features etc.) in subsequent releases.
We hope this helps explain what's been happening on the development side here recently.
